They are not any more detrimental to the game than any other specialized builds. Is a tank built only for Hami tanking detrimental to the game? No....it isn't.
There's also another side to this coin. People neglect to realize that you can build for EVERYTHING.
I have a fire/fire brute. It was made to be a farmer. But I didn't want to just stop there. I wanted a tank with Brute DPS. And you know what? I achieved that. Capped S/L. High all other resists except Toxic and Psi. High defenses. Can run +4x8 in fire farms. Can hold AV's. It's even tanked Hami before. It can do EVERYTHING.
Would you say that build is detrimental to the game?

I'm pretty sure I told you this myself.
There has only been so far one group of people running hami raids. That group of people usually makes it a point to get to Hive 1 early. So yes.....this is going to happen.
But again, as I'm sure I've said before.....this is a great opportunity for others to step up and start leading.
At this point.....honestly.....
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

The Hamikaze (before the zone cap) was the snorefest.
The only individual jobs for the raid were the leader and the taunters.
No yellow team. No blue team. No green team. Establish aggro and then have everyone run in and just beat Hami down. While the rewards for that method were great....it was indeed a snorefest.
No that we're back to the original method we've been having a LOT more fun.

Not entirely sure I understand what you're asking?
We're not changing the start times. Everyone is used to 10pm EST now....and it seems to work well. That's not stopping other people from running their own Hami raids at other times tho.
With the 50 player Hive zone cap now....this is a great opportunity for more raid leaders/hami tanks to step up as it's possible to have a hami raid going on in multiple hives now.
As far as how many times we do it....the first night of the new zone cap with still did it 3 times, just to prove that we could.
Last night we did it twice. I don't plan to do less than 2 per night if I'm leading.
As far as how long you have to wait.....that's really not the problem here. The biggest problem is now that there's a zone cap, you have to make sure to get there early, if you care about being able to get into Hive 1.
With that being said....we don't wait till 10pm EST anymore, even though that's the "official" start time. We usually start once the zone fills and nobody else can enter.

A level 50 recipe costs about 500k to craft.
If you dropped only 5 million that's only 10 IO's crafted. You can't build a full toon for that. And that's assuming you either had all the salvage already to craft them or bought the salvage with tickets.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's not possible.
For quite a few reasons.
1. The way news travels in this community.
2. Cypher has been seen at the Excelsior Hami Raids. GM Fiddleback as well.
3. The Hami guide I wrote in these forums had the zerg/hamikaze method in it
4. Literally any other number of posts in these forums/on their discord/on social media.
I'm sorry....but Leo would had to have literally been living under a rock not to know.

Improbable, not impossible.
Zerg raids with one league requires planning, having everyone on the league know what they're doing, making sure everyone stocks up with Warburg Nukes and Shivans, and stuff like that.
It's basically a whole lot of extra work to shave a few minutes off of a hami raid.

We have influence sinks.
Have you looked at the prices of Tier 3 and 4 incarnates?
There's also the Super Packs on the market. I think you underestimate how much money is being taken back out of the economy on those Super Packs.

This^^^^^
I'm still absolutely amazed at how CHEAP everything is on homecoming now.
I remember when a full set of IO's could cost you over 100 mil. Now it's about 25 mil tops, and that's for the REALLY good ones. (Standard sets, not purps/ATO/Winters)
I remember when a full build could easily cost you 2 billion influence.
I just built a toon completely out the other day and including buying salvage for crafting I only dropped about 250 million.
There's 2 reasons everything is so cheap now. The first is that we started fresh, WITH an economy from the beginning. CoH didn't have an economy till about Issue 10 originally. So you had tons of 50's with maxed out wallets and plenty of influence to burn.....so everything went for ridiculous prices.
The second reason is farmers. Thanks to them loading up the AH with drops, it drives prices down. (Basic economics: more supply = less demand = lower prices)